I posted in another thread, and was asked to make another. Basically, I've had my 9800GT for almost 1 1/2 years, I heard about the serious bug in driver 195.36.08, so avoided that and its never been installed. Driver 195.36.15 was announced on this forum on the 15th March, and is the current driver from today officially.

I installed driver 195.36.15 on the 15th, and had noticed it running slightly hotter than usual (74C), but assumed the weather warming up had something to do with it, I did notice the fan making a louder noise than usual, the temperature became fixed at 74, and did not exceed or fluctuate as it normally does during game play, it did cool to around 56 idle. And today (19th March) I started up a game using WINE, and after 10-15 minutes game play, the screen started flashing and was corrupted with a mosaic pattern, a second or two after the flashing, my PC froze, and became unresponsive.

Considering I've had my 9800GT for well over a year, and just over two days after installing the fixed driver, after a potentially damaging driver seems too coincidental to me.

I am using Ubuntu 9.10 32 bit with a pae kernal. I tried to take a photo, but the problems getting worse lots of flashing and a black screen with a strip of corrupted display at the top, although sometimes it freezes solid with, and without corruption (I'm not sure I should risk retrying, the PC was too expensive to experiment with ). I tried booting into Windows 7, and the same thing, same corrupted display, so my card is without doubt ruined.

Thanks for your post. The issue which led to us pulling the 195.36.08 driver was a fan control issue which was discovered by users of the Windows driver. What was happening was that under certain situations, the fans would not spin fast enough to cool the GPU adequately. The 195.36.15 driver incorporates the same fixes that resolved the issue on Windows and is absolutely safe to use.

From your description, in your case it appears that the fan was spinning at the maximum or close to maximum speed, since you heard the fan making a louder noise than usual. I suspect that whatever factors led to your GPU running hotter than it normally does caused the fan to speed up, which is the expected behavior. If you were experiencing issues with fan speed control, what we would expect instead would be that your GPU temperature would increase, and the fan would not speed up to cool it as the temperature continued to rise.

Another possibility is that there may be a physical failure (for example, bearings which have worn out prematurely) of your fan, which exhibited itself by making a loud noise, and reducing the performance of your fan, which could also lead to the observed temperature increases. You should be able to tell between these two cases by observing whether your fan is continuing to make a loud noise, and by characterizing the noise that you heard. (Did it sound like the normal increased noise level from a fan that is spinning faster to cool a hot GPU, or did it sound like a fan that is grinding on its bearings and struggling?)

In your original thread, you mentioned that you continued to observe corruption after rolling back the driver. What version did you roll it back to? (You said "the Ubuntu default proprietary driver", which on Ubuntu 9.10 I believe is a driver from our 185 branch, but I'm not 100% sure.) You can check your driver version in nvidia-settings, or with "cat /proc/drivers/nvidia/version". Better yet, you can post an nvidia-bug-report.log which will give us detailed information about your configuration. You can generate this by running nvidia-bug-report.sh as root.

This does seem like it is simply a very unfortunate coincidence to me. However, we do want to investigate the issue further to ensure it was just that and nothing more, and we appreciate your taking the time to report the issue.

I also have been experiencing some corruption after updating to 195.36.15 which didn't occur with 195.30. The screen will go black for a second or two randomly, will flash green randomly, and will show screen corruption randomly. All of this occurs very quickly, usually lasting no more then 2 seconds. Definitely too quick to be able to capture it with a camera.

I am using a GT220 card (w/fan) on a Debian linux 32bit system, though I have no clue if that's of any relevance. I am inclined to go back to 195.30 but haven't done so yet.

Thanks for your bug report. This sounds like a different issue from the one that Peaceseeker is experiencing. Please open a new thread for it, and include an nvidia-bug-report.log and a better description of when you observe this corruption, and what you are doing when it appears.

Danix, thanks for your reply. I don't really have any more information then what I posted earlier (except for the nvidia-bug-report.log). Although the only thing I could add would be that my Debian box either sits at the console login prompt or is playing live tv (using vdpau acceleration). There's no desktop or windows installed, no web, no anything other then console or tv. If you think this still deserves a new thread I'll be more then happy to create the nvidia-bug-report.log and make one.

I do believe it should get its own thread so that we can track this issue separately from the one that Peaceseeker has reported.

From what I understand from your report, the corruption appears, then disappears shortly afterwards. You don't mention any sort of crash or hang, so I'm assuming that after the corruption is gone, you're able to use the computer normally. Can you confirm this? (In your new thread about the issue, please.)